1ST OFFICER AT SCENE DESCRIBES HORROR.

Byline: Deborah Sullivan Staff Writer

As LAPD Sgt. Timothy Surette arrived at the North Valley Jewish Community Center, glass was still falling from shot-out windows, and people were screaming that the gunman had an Uzi machine gun.

Smoke hung so thickly that Surette - the first officer at the scene - could smell and even taste the bitter, sulfurous gunpowder, he said Friday.

After 14 years on the police force and despite a stint as a surgical orderly, Surette said nothing could have prepared him for the devastation he found.

Amid the destruction, Surette's thoughts flashed to his own home in Santa Clarita, to his own 3-year-old son and the new baby he and his wife are expecting.

What if they had been here, he remembers thinking, and shuddering. But if they were, he reasoned, they would want him to concentrate on the crisis.

``If they were there, they wouldn't want me to stop,'' he said.

The day-care center, a haven of safety and comfort that he passed daily on his beat, was shattered into an inferno of gunsmoke, wreckage and bleeding children.

``I drive by there every day and see kids playing, birds singing,'' he said. ``To drive up and see broken glass, kids screaming and smoke still in the air - it was heart-wrenching. It's traumatic, it's scary.''

Surette and about 40 other police and fire personnel received commendations at City Hall on Friday from city officials who praised their swift, skilled response. More than 300 law enforcement and fire officers converged on the site in the hour after a lone gunman blasted the center with 70 gunshots.

Surette was the first to respond after he heard the call while cruising up Balboa Boulevard shortly before 11 a.m. Tuesday. He raced to the scene, aware only that there was a shooting on Rinaldi Street and Hayvenhurst Avenue. Arriving at the center, he saw 16-year-old camp counselor Mindy Finkelstein collapsed on the ground, comforted by a weeping friend.

``She was in a lot of pain,'' Surette said. ``I just said, stay with us, stay with us.''

He looked for the gunman but did not see him and now feels certain he fled even as police were arriving. ``That's the most amazing part - some of us had to drive right by him.''

Surette cautiously entered the building, scanning for potential cover in case the gunman emerged. What he saw burns in his memory.

``There were brass casings all over, impacts on the wall and glass on the floor,'' he said. Blood pooled in an adjacent classroom, he said.

The receptionist, 68-year-old Isabelle Shalometh, was bleeding and crying, her arm grazed by a bullet.

Another staffer was on the phone, frantically calling for help. The woman was so distraught, he said, that she failed to recognize him as an officer and implored him to call the police.

``I said, I know ma'am, I'm here, I'm here,'' he reassured her.

Most horrifying, however, was the face of 5-year-old Benjamin Kadish, the youngest and most critically injured in the attack. The boy was pale, so stunned by pain that he wasn't crying, merely struggling to breathe. As his color drained, his eyes rolled backward.

``You see him sick, see him hurt, and when his eyes rolled in the back of his head and he went gray, I thought oh my God, he's going under,'' Surette said.

Firefighter paramedic Todd Carb reached young Benjamin moments later and began working to save him. The boy's pulse was nearly undetectable, his eyes vacant and his blood so low that Carb was unable to start an intravenous line.

When the boy's eyes rolled back again, ``I thought he had gone into traumatic full arrest,'' Carb said.

Carb and his partner delivered the boy to Providence Holy Cross Medical Center in a harrowing ambulance ride. The boy, later transferred to Childrens Hospital, is in critical condition, but stable.

Carb said the event was the among the most intense and stressful episodes of his 19-year career.

``Driving to the scene, (I thought) we could have potentially a massacre on our hands,'' he said. ``It was a very frightening, very terrifying dispatch.''

The chilling image of the child's fading face stays with Surette, replaying in his mind like the television broadcasts of the attack.

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